Marvel Strike Force’s Latest Update is Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

Summer hasn’t been too kind to Marvel Strike Force. One bad decision after another has left the player community up in arms and frustrated with its developer FoxNext. There’s been a ton of churn even in my own Alliance and I have friends who have lost most of their membership over the past few weeks. FoxNext’s response to everything going on has been what I could best describe as flailing. We’ve seen tons of new offers and a deluge of non-stop events to get people paying and playing. It feels like the developer is just throwing everything it can at us to get people to hang around.

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Frankly, it’s been a bit overwhelming. One of the more frustrating new trends I’ve been noticing is the developer’s reliance on gating content and characters through the need for high star level characters of a particular trait. Iron Man required players have a full team of 5* Avengers characters to unlock, the Payday event requires Mercenaries, Star Lord required Guardians, and so on. This wouldn’t be too terrible if these events were spread out over a longer term, but with how compressed everything has been over the last few weeks, it’s basically impossible to prepare for any of these events without spending tons of money.

Even in the cases where these trait gates weren’t involved, such as the campaign events for Wasp and Ant-Man, the execution on FoxNext’s part was still frustrating. Layering RNG upon RNG was just too much. Thankfully, FoxNext dropped a new update yesterday that mostly sets the game on a better footing for these sorts of things going forward.

Four new characters are coming to Marvel Strike Force in the near future, including: Scarlet Witch, Loki, Ms. Marvel, and Nick Fury. The first of these new characters, Scarlet Witch, is now available through a new campaign event released with yesterday’s patch and the structure of the campaign is a significant improvement over the ones preceding it.

Responding to community feedback, FoxNext has set up the three different campaign difficulty modes (Easy, Medium, and Hard) in a way that makes the basic notion of unlocking the character feasible for everyone. Easy is meant to be completed by the broad playerbase and guarantees drops so that players will realistically be able to unlock a 2* (or even 3*) Scarlet Witch by the end of the event. Medium is geared towards ending up with a 3-4* Scarlet Witch. And for those who are really hardcore about the game, the opportunity to unlock up to a 7* Scarlet Witch can be had by working on the Hard campaign.

In short, if your goal is simply to add the character to your roster, it’s perfectly reasonable to expect to be able to do so with characters released through a campaign event. Your results beyond that will vary depending on how invested you are in the game. Of course, like most things FoxNext, a step forward is often accompanied by a step back, and even this latest revamp is no different. The Medium and Hard difficulty modes of the Scarlet Witch event are both trait gated with a requirement of 3 Mystic characters for Medium and 5 (well-equipped) Mystic characters for Hard. Ms. Marvel will release through a campaign event as well, with only her Medium and Hard modes gated by the need for City characters.

Another ‘step forward, step back’ aspect of the update is related to Nick Fury. As in Marvel Heroes, Nick Fury is coming to Marvel Strike Force as what can be best described as a pet class. Nick’s kit is designed entirely around having strong synergy with SHIELD minions, which is super awesome, because FoxNext also just made a full pass on SHIELD minions to make the idea of fielding them not sound terrible. Most of the SHIELD minions are now pretty decent and they will be even better with a force multiplier like Nick Fury leading them. The catch? Nick Fury will be unlocked through a Legendary event requiring Kree minions. Kree minions are terrible and fairly hard to farm, so unless you start working on farming Kree dudes up to 5* now, you’re likely to miss out on your chance to recruit the Director of Shield.

The way things are going, FoxNext has what appears to be a fairly obvious strategy of requiring players to basically 5* just about every character on the roster to be able to participate in the various events it intends to implement. Again, I don’t think this would bother me too much if I could actually focus on farming characters up in anticipation of a particular event, but the team is just overloading the playerbase with too many of these events and it’s incredibly frustrating.

I’m glad FoxNext appears to finally be listening to the community and making some positive changes from the feedback it’s received on the game, but ease up, my dudes. Give us some time to breathe.

Michael Bitton / Michael began his career at the WarCry Network in 2005 as the site manager for several different WarCry fansite portals. In 2008, Michael worked for the startup magazine Massive Gamer as a columnist and online news editor. In June of 2009, Michael joined MMORPG.com as the site''s Community Manager.